Good Reads: From rules for rebels, to elevator cables, to an enchanting sci-fi world
This week's round-up of Good Reads includes rules for arming rebels, defense contractors may know more than our own government, buildings may get taller thanks to new elevator cables, a profile of a cyberwar general, and sci-fi brings magic back to the mundane.
Women rebel soldiers receive training in Aleppo, Syria.
Muzaffar Salman/Reuters
Rules for arming Syria
With the United States inexorably heading toward greater involvement in Syria’s civil war, the need to figure out the “rules of engagement” has taken on more urgency. In a Foreign Policy piece titled “5 Rules for Arming Rebels,” Edward Luttwak offers a list that’s short and simple – but not easy.
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Rule No. 1: “Figure out who your friends are” – presents no easy task in sizing up the various Syrian insurgent groups. Rule No. 4: “Do not invite an equal and opposite response by another great power” – translates as “Make sure you come to an understanding with Russia, the patron of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, before diving in.” Russia may insist that Mr. Assad play some continuing role.
“The Obama administration ... can convincingly argue (despite the somewhat inconclusive and murky assertion that Assad’s use of chemical weapons has now been verified) that it must provide some help to the rebels simply to deny a victory to Iran and Hezbollah,” Mr. Luttwak writes. “Even so, one hopes that it retains its prudence – and keeps these five rules in mind.”
RECOMMENDED: Opinion Five guidelines for US role in Syria
Spies among us
While the world plays a game of “Where's Edward?,” the whereabouts of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden – and whether the US will be able to extradite him for prosecution – are just the most public parts of the story. A recent in-depth piece examines a private US spy organization that operates off the radar. In BusinessWeek, authors Drake Bennett and Michael Riley peer inside Booz Allen Hamilton, Mr. Snowden’s employer, a private contractor whose roots go back to World War II, when it tracked Nazi U-boats. In the last fiscal year, Booz Allen reported $5.76 billion in revenue, 99 percent of it from government contracts. Some $1.3 billion of that was from US intelligence agencies.
The firm is saturated with “intelligence community heavyweights,” and sends its alums back into government as well, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Riley say. They include James Clapper, a former Booz Allen executive who is President Obama’s principal intelligence adviser; Mike McConnell, a Booz Allen vice president who was George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence; and Joan Dempsey, a former CIA deputy director who now works for Booz Allen.
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